New Universe, New Classes

2017·02·27by JeffL

New Universe

Attention Star Sonata, on Saturday March 11 at 1:00 PM Eastern / Server time, there will be a universe reset to a 1 week temporary universe. That means that all deployed bases and the entire universe itself will be destroyed, but after a short delay, a new universe will manifest into existence. All of your ships and bots will transfer over into the new universe, but be aware of the last ship that you are in before the universe implodes, because that will be the ship you will be flying in the new universe, and you won’t want to dock all your ships in the wrong place just to switch out of your storage Thatch.

New Classes

At the same time as the universe reset, we will be patching in the new class system. The new class system moves away from all class skills being regular skills that you have to train at special locations. Instead, upon reaching certain level milestones (5, 10, 20, 40, 65, 100, 150, 200, 300, 400, 500, 600, 700, 800, 1000), you will be able to train a new skill from the class skill tree inside the character dialog. In addition to the new class skills which don’t cost any skill points, there are new Zen skills for each focus and class which do cost skill points and roughly equal the old skill point costs of all the previous class skills. The overall power and stats of each class is designed to be very close to the previous classes at end-game, but much more powerful and impactful at early game. We do plan to do a class rebalance later, after this new system is in place and everyone has had a good chance to try it and give feedback. When you first log in, all your old class skills will be automatically reset, and you can choose/re-choose your new class skills from the character dialog.

Another New Universe

Because of the way a lot of the AI use existing class skills, we needed to patch in the classes at the same time as a universe reset. But we don’t want to force people to deal with re-classing and building on the same day, so we are doing a 1-week temporary universe to try out the classes and maybe some other random stuff. There will be a new-new universe on March 18 at the regular time. If all goes well with the classes and the new universes, we will be announcing the official Steam launch date shortly thereafter.

About JeffL

I'm one of the three founders of Star Sonata and currently the majority owner of the company. I'm the lead designer, but also do some programming, all the accounting and business, and project and product management for the game.